1.

On a sweltering morning in Port-au-Prince, in July of
1915, a party of gentlemen attired in black morning coats, striped pants,
and bowler hats strolled past the wrought-iron gates and around the courtyard
of the elegant mansion that housed the French legation and pushed through
a side door. When the French minister stepped forward to meet the gentlemen—whom
he recognized as the crème de la crème of Haitian society most
of them light-skinned, and educated, like their fathers before them, in
the finest schools of Paris—they ignored him, shouldered their way
roughly past, and began searching through the sumptuous parlors and then
through the back rooms, until at last they uncovered, cowering in a tiny
bathroom, one General Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, president of the Republic
of Haiti. After managing, with some difficulty, to break the president's
terrified hold on the rack of chamber pots, the gentlemen dragged his
prone body out of the building, through the cobblestoned courtyard, and
heaved it over the spiked-iron fence to the screaming mob beyond.

"There was one terrific howl of fury," a young American
diplomat reported,

I could see that something or somebody was on
the ground in the center of the crowd, just before the gates, and when
a man disentangled himself from the crowd and rushed howling by me, with
a severed hand from which the blood was dripping, the thumb of which he
had stuck in his mouth, I knew that the assassination of the President
was accomplished. Behind him came other men with the feet, the other hand,
the head, and other parts of the body displayed on poles, each one followed
by a mob of screaming men and women.

The diplomat hurried back to the American legation and
there composed a brief cable for the secretary of state in Washington:
"MOB INVADED FRENCH LEGATION, TOOK OUT PRESIDENT, KILLED AND DISMEMBERED
HIM."[1] That afternoon,
on President Wilson's order, the Navy Department radioed a message to
Rear Admiral William B. Caperton, commanding the armored cruiser USS Washington,
which was on patrol just off the Haitian coast: "STATE DEPARTMENT DESIRES
AMERICAN FORCES BE LANDED PORT-AU-PRINCE AND AMERICAN AND FOREIGN INTERESTS
BE PROTECTED." Shortly before six o'clock, 330 khaki-clad US Marines came
ashore north of Port-au-Prince and marched upon the capital. They had
come to restore order, to protect American interests, and to "professionalize"
the Haitian Army. They would remain nearly twenty years.

Six
decades have passed since the Marines departed Haiti, leaving behind a
few well-paved roads, a handful of new agricultural and vocational schools,
and an American-trained, "nonpolitical" army. As I write, in early October,
another several hundred American troops are preparing to disembark in
Port-au-Prince. Their stated mission, once again, is to "retrain" and
"professionalize" the Haitian army and thereby "get it out of politics."
Their larger task, however, and that of the hundreds of other foreign
troops and police accompanying them, is to make possible the return to
the vast white presidential palace of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a
tiny, bespectacled man who, even in Haiti's long and colorful history
of delirious emperors, mad kings, and paranoid dictators, stands out as
an extraordinary political phenomenon.

Before the Haitian military overthrew him and expelled
him from the country, on September 30, 1991, Father Aristide had spent
scarcely thirty-one weeks in the Palace—a brief span though by no
means the briefest in Haitian history. (The unfortunate President Sam,
for one, was in office for barely five months, and he was only the last
and least lucky of a series of eight men who had occupied the Palace during
the seven riotous years before the American invasion.) Aristide's administration
was the sixth, or arguably the seventh (depending on how you count), to
hold the Palace since Jean-Claude Duvalier fled the country, on February
7, 1986, and thereby opened the current parenthèse —the
"parenthesis" of disorder and political struggle that has traditionally
separated the fall of one Haitian ruler and the rise of the next.

What distinguishes Aristide from the rest, however, is
neither the brevity of his tenure nor the abruptness of his departure
but the fact that his exile is scheduled to come to an end. The senior
officers of the Haitian army, under an accord signed July 3 in New York,
have agreed that the president they deposed should return to Haiti and
reoccupy the Palace. This is something new in the history of Haiti, which
has, since winning its glorious independence in 1804, seen forty-odd men
and one woman attain the Palace and then leave it in various ways—one
by execution, one by suicide, two by assassination, one by fiery explosion
(consuming the Palace and the president along with it), five by more or
less natural death, and twenty-odd by various sorts of violent overthrow.
In those 189 years, in which a score or so deposed presidents have lived
out their forced and generally opulent retirements in Paris and Kingston
and New York, no ruler has ever returned from exile to retake power. And
yet according to the so-called Accord de Governors Island—named for
the spot of land in New York Harbor where it was negotiated and signed—President
Aristide is to return to the white palace in Port-au-Prince on October
30.

As
I write, there is a new prime minister in Haiti, chosen by Aristide and
inducted into office at the end of August in Washington, and a "new campaign
of terror," orchestrated by elements in the police and army.[2]
The prime minister, Robert Malval, is a light-skinned businessman from
an old elite family, whom the president chose both for his political charm
and for his lifelong connections among the country's powerful. The campaign
of terror, carried on largely—but by no means exclusively—in
the vast slums that engulf the capital like tumors that have overwhelmed
their host, constitutes a more extreme phase of the efficient political
repression that began with the coup d'état two years ago.
Diplomats and human rights observers in Haiti agree that it is "the worst
wave of politically related violence…since the early days" after
the coup.[3]

Even on the very day late in June when Aristide and his
associates and Cédras and his officers began working out their accord
in New York, in Port-au-Prince heavily armed police were invading a church
during mass and beating up parishioners who had shouted the deposed president's
name—a scene broadcast live on the state television network. Scarcely
a week after the accord was signed in July police and armed civilians
violently broke up peaceful, pro-Aristide demonstrations in Port-au-Prince.
On August 17, prominent supporters of Aristide who were attempting to
hang posters of the president in an effort to test the regime's sincerity
were beaten in broad daylight by uniformed police. From Washington, President
Aristide protested:

The bread that the people of Haiti need most
is the bread of peace, the bread of security. If citizens want to hold
a photo of the president in their hands, they should be able to do so
without being beaten. If citizens want to speak to journalists, they should
be able to do so. If people want to walk the streets day or night without
being victims of terrorism, that must become a reality also.[4]

Fifteen days after he uttered these words, Aristide had
his answer. On the morning of September 11, during a service commemorating
the fifth anniversary of a horrific massacre in Aristide's church, armed
men wearing civilian clothes and carrying walkietalkies entered the Church
of the Sacred Heart in downtown Port-au-Prince and demanded that Antoine
Izmery, a prominent Haitian businessman and longtime Aristide supporter,
accompany them. The men led him out to the street where, before the eyes
of a number of passers-by—and perhaps fifty yards away from a truckload
of police who had been patrolling around the church—the men forced
Izmery to kneel on the pavement and put his hands behind his neck, whereupon
one of the men placed a gun to his left ear and executed him.

Three days earlier five people were killed when Evans
Paul, who had been elected mayor of the capital at the same time Aristide
became president, attempted to re-occupy his office. During the first
three weeks of September alone, at least fifty people are thought to have
been assassinated in the capital, an uncertain number of them having disappeared
at night, only to reappear in the early morning as corpses, left like
offerings on the filthy streets of Port-au-Prince. Arson, murder, mysterious
bursts of gunfire during the night—all the tactics of street terror
by which the Haitian political conversation is lent emphasis and tone
in times of stress—are clearly on the rise. On September 21, the
"civil mission," established by the United Nations and the Organization
of American States to monitor human rights violations in Haiti, spoke
of "armed groups…preparing to commit violent acts," the drawing up
of "death lists," and an "alarming" number of "arbitrary executions, suspicious
deaths, kidnappings and forced disappearances."[5]
On October 5, thirty armed civilians firing automatic weapons attacked
a meeting in a Port-au-Prince hotel, firing upon, among others, a United
Nations Security officer, and narrowly missing Mayor Paul, who had escaped
moments before.

"The
situation can be changed," Aristide had said in late August. "The situation
has to change"—implying, it appears, that if "l'insécurité,"
as Haitians call it, persisted, he might decline to return. To the authors
of the violence, of course, this is scarcely a threat; preventing the
president's return is precisely their object. Aristide's warning is instead
directed at the United Nations, under whose auspices the pact was concluded.
For his part, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general, has vowed
that severe economic sanctions, which were imposed in June and lifted
after Malval took office, will "automatically" be reimposed if "numerous
violations of…human rights and fundamental freedoms" are uncovered
in Haiti.[6] These conditions
would appear to have been fully satisfied; and yet the installation of
Robert Malval means that in reimposing sanctions the United Nations would
be placing itself in the somewhat absurd position of punishing Aristide's
own government.

Malval, however, appears to have secured at most very
limited authority over the governmental apparatus—as of this writing,
many of his ministers have not even managed to occupy their offices—and
even less over the fractious and rebarbative Haitian military. From Washington,
Aristide raged that Cédras and Colonel Michel Franí§ois (the
Port-au-Prince police chief who is generally thought to control the paramilitary
forces doing most of the killing) were "assassins" and demanded their
"immediate" removal—while stopping short, however, of calling for
the reimposition of sanctions.

Clearly, the crux of the matter will be "the international
force," or "technical mission," or "mission in Haiti," or any of the other
euphemisms by which the UN's multilateral military force is known. That
President Aristide, whose past rhetoric has been defiantly nationalistic
and—on occasion—vividly anti-American, may return to Haiti thanks
in large part to the assistance of American troops is a very ticklish
matter. The provisions involving foreign forces have been vociferously
protested by political parties of both the left and the right. For this
reason, the language of the Governors Island Accord on this point—number
five of a ten-point document—is especially vague:

5. Implementation, following the agreements
with the constitutional Government, of international cooperation:

a) technical and financial assistance for development;

b) assistance for the administrative and judicial
reform;

c) assistance for modernizing the Armed Forces
of Haiti and establishing a new Police Force with the presence of United
Nations personnel in these fields.

As I write, the specific rules of engagement for the
forces remain unclear, though the 590 Americans, according to Secretary
of Defense Les Aspin, will be undertaking a "civil affairs mission," which,
he says, "is not a peacekeeping role."[7]
Another, unnamed, official told the Times that the Americans will
"have a narrow mandate to be there and rub off on the police and the army,
who magically by osmosis are supposed to behave themselves; to conduct
themselves more professionally."[8]

One need not be intimately familiar with Haitian politics
to recognize this as a dubious strategy. Although Clinton administration
officials told the Times that the UN force "will be lightly armed
and will have no mandate to stop Haitian soldiers and paramilitary elements
from committing atrocities," it is clear that, for the Governors Island
Accord to have any chance of success, the soldiers and sailors and technical
experts of the multilateral force must somehow accomplish two broad and
very complicated tasks: they must help reduce the political violence that
Haitian soldiers and their civilian associates are now inflicting on Aristide's
supporters; and they must somehow protect the men who have wielded power
during the last two years—particularly the "ti soldats," or
"little soldiers": the enlisted men—from the retribution of Aristide's
followers.

These
two goals remain closely linked: the current repression is aimed both
at intimidating Aristide's better-known supporters and at dismantling
his political network, mostly by murdering his most important followers
in the slums; and it is precisely these followers, those who survive at
any rate, who would be in a position to mobilize "the streets" for the
president, and against the army and his other enemies, if he returns.
Though his critics might say otherwise, President Aristide is by no means
the first Haitian leader to make some use of street justice—violent
popular retribution has been a traditional accompaniment of political
change in Haiti—but for a number of reasons he has had an especially
difficult time controlling it.

The central peculiarity of the Governors Island Accord
is that it may well make political retribution more rather than less likely.
For the ten points of the accord include no provision for the legitimate
application of justice—on the contrary. Though officers of the Haitian
Army violently overthrew the legally elected and internationally recognized
leader of their country and then proceeded to murder a large number of
his followers—estimates of the number killed range from five hundred
to several thousand—the accord requires that Aristide grant an amnesty
to those responsible. Only Lieutenant General Raoul Cédras, the commander
in chief, will bear any official responsibility, and that almost ludicrously
light: the general, according to point number eight, "has decided to avail
himself of his right to early retirement…." (It is understood, though
not formally inscribed, that the general will take a number of colleagues
with him.)

These provisions are the heart of the accord; they made
it possible and, at the same time, they constitute its fatal flaw. "This
was the sine qua non of the thing," a close colleague of Aristide's told
me by telephone from Port-au-Prince. "Without the amnesty there would
have been no agreement." It is likely that only the clear threat of international—which
is to say, American—armed intervention in Haiti could have forced
Haitian officers and their well-to-do backers to accept both Aristide's
return and punishment for staging the coup against him; but the Americans,
for their part, showed themselves distinctly unwilling to undertake such
an intervention; Aristide, after almost two years in exile, had to take
what he could get. He was forced, in other words, to sign on to a Faustian
bargain. In order to attain international support to return to the Palace,
he essentially agreed to treat the coup d'état and the killing
that followed it as if they had never happened.

Politically and personally, this had to be enormously
painful for Aristide to do—it was precisely his reluctance to commit
himself to such a deal that led to the collapse of the so-called "Washington
Agreement" of February 1992, and he agreed to these terms now only under
enormous pressure. (A "senior diplomat" at the United Nations described
to one reporter how, when Aristide had hesitated to sign the accord without
having more assurances that certain officers would be purged, the president
of Haiti was presented with "a simple choice: 'Sign the agreement or return
to Washington and begin applying for a green card."')[9]

Put in these terms, the choice was quite clear: Aristide
signed. But, as he must have known, he was putting his name to a deeply
flawed document, one that lacks provisions for adequate enforcement, and
much else. What is most painfully missing from the accord, making something
of a mockery of its provisions for "assistance for…judicial reform,"
is any idea of justice. And it is on the idea and the promise of justice
that Father Aristide has built his life and his career.

2.

It was during the early days of the dechoukaj—the
"uprooting" that followed the fall of the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier
in 1986—that I first visited the Church of St. Jean Bosco, on the
edge of the great slummetropolis of La Saline. The first burst of celebration
and retribution had ended, but the images remained indelible: Haitians
dancing in the streets, passing among themselves bottles of clairin,
the cheap Haitian rum; invading the hastily abandoned homes of Duvalier's
associates and stripping the walls bare, ripping out even the electrical
fixtures and the plumbing. Angry crowds of poor Haitians surrounding an
unlucky Tonton Macoute—no longer the arrogant, all-powerful murderer
he had been as one of Duvalier's henchmen but now a frightened, pleading
man in civilian clothes, having hurriedly discarded his blue denim uniform—and
hacking him apart with machetes. Other Macoutes were stoned, or covered
with gasoline and burned alive. Their remains were left lying in the sun
to be further abused, or in some cases they were paraded through the streets
like war trophies: a bloody severed head speared on the end of a pole;
a shrunken, charred torso lashed to a wooden strut like a roasted pig.

"I stood and marveled at the justice of the people,"
Father Aristide told me as he sat in his church that March, startling
me with the passion in his voice, the proud delectation with which he
drew out the word "émerveillé." He smiled patiently at
my surprise, and at the inevitable question: How could he, a priest, call
such acts "justice"? How could he countenance mobs burning men alive in
the streets? "One must know when to look at the acts of the people and
judge them as a psychologist, not as a priest," he replied, and then,
a bit more heatedly, "Our consciences should be clear"—this drew
nods from several of the young people seated at the table with us—"These
Macoutes were Satan," he said intensely, leaning forward until
his face was only a few inches from mine, "We saw Satan incarnate in certain
of these Macoutes. It was the people who suffered, and the people themselves
who decided to act; and in this they were doing God's work."

By
then, everyone in Haiti was familiar with these simple and powerful equations—that
political exploitation and repression equal Satan's work; that the struggle
for liberation and revolution equal the work of God. These were, after
all, the bedrock teachings of the ti kominite legliz, the "little
church communities" or "base communities" that had sprouted around the
country to spread the teachings of liberation theology. The thirty-two-year-old
Father Aristide had quickly become the ti legliz's most famous
leader. Even while Duvalier still clung to power, Aristide had risen in
his church to identify the dictator, personally, with Satan.[10]
In 1985, ten months before the dictator fled—when few would have
dared to predict that such a thing could come about so soon, and with
so little bloodshed—the tiny priest had stood in the Cathedral of
Port-au-Prince and delivered an unforgettable sermon.

If one sought a model of liberation theology preaching,
of the grafting of the teachings of the Bible to their implications for
present-day social action, one could scarcely do better than "A Call to
Holiness," delivered during Holy Week, 1985. Beginning with the proposition
that "Jesus is truth," the young priest proceeds to tell the truth as
he sees it, remarking on, among other things, the strange absence of Haitian
saints in the Church of Rome; the iniquity of "the big capitalist bosses"
who, every time they "pay out one dollar,…take in four"; the biblical
admonition for periodic land reform ("The year of grace demands a redistribution
of the land"). But nothing that comes before prepares one for the climax:

As a roaring lion, and a raging bear, so is
a wicked ruler over the poor people" (Prov 28:15). Those are not my words.
If those words make you feel angry, they're right there in your Bible:
rip out the page, but don't try to beat me up, because those are not my
words.

To become more holy, to do God's will, Abraham
accepted to sacrifice his only son.

And you too, whatever your life may be, whatever
your work, whatever your prestige, the only honest and holy route is to
be willing to sacrifice all to do the Lord's bidding. And during this
sacrifice you may receive many blows…. I expect to receive blows,
too, and you must expect that also, even though it is not what we hope
for; we must expect it.

St. Paul says: "Thrice was I beaten, once was
I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck….Beside those things that are
without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches"
(2 Corinthians 11:25"“28).

Thus must we expect to suffer to make our church
holy, and to do the bidding of the Lord. To do the will of the Lord, you
must learn to choose the Lord—or else you choose the devil.

To live a holy life you must make that choice.
You cannot be holy and make compromises with Satan. You have to think
the way the fellow in Psalm 1 thinks: "Blessed is the man that walketh
not in the counsel of the ungodly."

When I was thinking about this psalm, I was
praying, and I will tell you how I put the psalm to paper:

"Hallelujah for men and women in Haiti who do
not join forces with the malevolent regime. Hallelujah for the Haitians
who do not enter into the gluttonous pillaging by a band of the bloodthirsty,
in whose midst brother sells brother….Hallelujah, because the path
of those Haitians who reject the regime is the path of righteousness and
love, and this is what the Lord requires. Where there is beating, breaking,
and destruction, the righteous man is not. The way of the Lord is the
way of justice, and justice blooms on the banks of Deliverance."

Amen.

To
denounce "the malevolent regime" and its "gluttonous pillaging," to urge
Haitians in the name of "righteousness" to "reject the regime," and to
do it from the pulpit of the Cathedral of Port-au-Prince a few blocks
from the Palace—in the spring of 1985, this was an act of almost
reckless courage. In its three decades of power, the Duvalier regime had
not shown itself reluctant to murder priests and, before this act of the
drama had concluded the following February, it would demonstrate its willingness
to do so once again. The strength of Aristide's voice (magnified by the
audio cassettes by which his followers spread his words around the country),
his unfailing insistence that the truth must be told and that "justice"
must be done, had begun to make him a hero; the first attempt on his life,
coming the week before Duvalier finally fled, began the apotheosis into
myth:

That morning, before the demonstration was to
take place, I was to say my usual nine o'clock Sunday morning Mass….
I went into the sacristy and I saw through the grating that the courtyard
in front was full of people holding tree branches in their hands—in
Haiti, a sign of a crowd ready to demonstrate. I hurried into the church,
where two priests were saying the early morning Mass. I sat down on a
chair near them, and I could hear the people inside and outside chanting:
"Miracle, miracle," and waving the branches above their heads…. Suddenly
I saw a man appear before me with a revolver trained on me. I didn't know
if he was going to shoot me, or what he was going to do with it. But the
way I felt about it then—as I still do, years after—was that
because of my temperament, my conviction, my faith, my duty and my responsibility,
if I were to die, let me die in my place, where I belong. Therefore I
just sat there, waiting, and he pointed the revolver at me, and then—miracle,
miracle—he opened it, took out the bullets, and handed the gun and
the bullets to me.

It was the first attempt, but the pattern of its elements—the
unearthly foreshadowings ("miracle, miracle"), the confrontation, the
absolute calm at the moment of what seems certain death—would reappear.
"The day of my death had come and had gone, and I was still alive," Aristide
writes. "…But as I have said, there is always a first time, but never
a last." A year and a half later, in the midst of the strikes and urban
violence of August 1987, Aristide and several colleagues traveled north
to say an open-air mass in memory of several hundred peasants who had
been murdered in and around the village of Jean-Rabel. Saying mass in
the capital that morning, Aristide paused to tell his congregation that
he felt "as if I were saying my own funeral Mass…." Later that day,
as he stood in the open air before the crowd at Pont-Sondé:

I heard a sound like a gun being fired. And
of course, it was a gun being fired. They fired over and over,
several men…people were falling and running in all directions. Near
me, I could see three men in hats, wearing white, revolvers in hand, shooting
in different directions.

One of them pointed his gun directly at me,
standing there. I was standing there because at that moment I was unable
to run and leave everybody. I could not take to my heels like a bad pastor,
and leave my sheep behind to face the guns. Even though it was obvious
that, strategically speaking, it would have been better for me to protect
myself, I was incapable of it. I felt calm, and I stood there, and I saw
the gun…and I heard the noise of the bullets. He missed me, and began
again, and again I saw the smoke and heard the noise, and he missed me
again. And then I saw him begin to move backward, and surely his hand
must have trembled, because he shot again, and again he missed. And then
suddenly I heard a woman say: "Lie down!" and she grabbed my foot, and
I found myself beneath a mountain of people who were protecting me….

Here the ambience of miracle, the shadow of heavenly
protection, is more explicit, felt instinctively by the would-be assassin
and reflected back to the priest in the trembling of his killer's hand.
By now Aristide had come into open conflict with his order and his Church;
his superiors had tried to transfer him out of the country, and had been
blocked—in the first instance of another pattern that would be repeated—by
"the people," a group of whom occupied the Cathedral and staged a hunger
strike there. Aristide's criticism of the Haitian Church, and "the man
in Rome," would become increasingly bitter. (To the military junta that
replaced Duvalier, Aristide writes, "the cold country to our north and
the man in Rome were dictating strategy.") By now, Aristide was well on
his journey from priest to leader, and then to symbol. "Through us, the
people gained strength," he writes. "Through the story of our triumph
over the forces of evil, the people were heartened. If we could face death
and not die, then they could face death and not die."

That
many drew this lesson from the improbable survival of Aristide is in contestable;
but of course the lesson wasn't true: if the Almighty had chosen to drape
his cloak about the little priest, he withheld it from many ordinary Haitians.
Many people would die, and are still dying. A year later, in 1987, when
screaming, howling Duvalierists invaded St. Jean Bosco as Father Aristide
said mass, and began hacking at parishoners with machetes and shooting
them with automatic weapons as the panicked people rushed about before
the priest's horrified eyes, at least thirteen people did die, and probably
more. (The attackers doused the church with gasoline and burned it down,
together with the corpses lying amid the pews inside.) Aristide, incapacitated
by one of his "nervous crises," was virtually kidnapped by the Church,
and secreted away from both enemies and supporters.

It didn't matter, though. Within days, the military government
of the time—a particularly bloody and decadent affair led by General
Henri Namphy and a group of former Duvalierist cronies—would fall
to a coup. Aristide himself, shorn of his church, had already become something
much larger than a radical priest. White-robed, hands outstretched Christ-like
as he preached, he had become pure symbol: the one righteous leader in
a nation shorn of them, the pure-hearted bringer of Justice.

3.

The word itself comes early and often in Aristide:
An Autobiography, appearing first on the lips of his maternal grandfather,
who "played the role of justice of the peace" in Port-Salut, the tiny
village on Haiti's remote southern peninsula where Aristide was born on
July 15, 1953. Though his father died shortly after he was born and his
mother moved to the capital with her small family—the infant Jean-Bertrand
and a sister two years older—she brought the children back to spend
summers in their home village, and to live in the house of her father.
That house, Aristide writes, "was not in the heart of the village, but…among
the hills, the 'mornes,' as we call the greater part of the country, those
cultivated hills where two-thirds of Haitians live. There are no trees;
the deforestation is so great that erosion is progressing rapidly. There
are neither roads, nor water, nor electricity…nor agronomist."[11]
In other words, a typical Haitian village, where peasants have seen their
plots grow progressively smaller over the decades as they have been divided
among successive, ever larger generations; where the relentless harvesting
of trees (to make way for more precious farmland and to produce charcoal
for cash) has led to catastrophic erosion—and, during the last few
decades, to a vast migration to the slums of the cities.

Aristide
paints a rather idyllic picture of the countryside, emphasizing its "sense
of community with egalitarian aspirations':

Try to imagine a group of about three dozen
[peasants]. Since they never had clocks or watches, the lanbi,
or [conch-shell], served as a signal to gather the work gangs, the konbit.
Among them I discovered an organized people, their tools made by those
who wielded them, who showed perfect solidarity in their work. It was
an egalitarian social organization whose guiding purpose was to furnish
the necessary food for each family. Had it not been for the abuses of
the local potentates, and sometimes the caprices of the weather, they
would have succeeded.

Into this Eden has wriggled the snake of arbitary power;
for overshadowing the bucolic solidarity of the Haitian countryside is
the predatory Haitian state, which extracts the wealth and prosperity
from the country and its people like some enormous and insatiable bloodsucker.
The state functions like a perverted private enterprise by which the tiny
elite—French-speaking, Catholic, predominantly foreign-educated and
light-skinned—lives off the labor of the larger population, which
remains predominantly peasant, Creole-speaking, illiterate, voodoo-practicing,
and darkskinned. By levying extortionate taxes on agricultural production,
and by granting to a select few among the elite the monopolies to import
necessities, those in power in the capital have drawn out the wealth that
once had been shared among the peasants, until, during the last few decades,
the exhausted land, deforested and eroded, began to consume itself.

The local agent of central power is the chef de section,
or sheriff, who serves as policeman, judge, tax collector, jailer, and
executioner; traditionally, he has been the gros nèg, or "big
man," in the village—the middle-class landowner, the man who has
the cash to hire other peasants to help gather his harvest. Aristide's
grandfather, playing "the role of justice of the peace," appears to have
been something of a gros nèg himself, and a touch of defensiveness
creeps into the president's treatment of him:

How could my grandfather have been seen as one
of those rural gentleman-exploiters of peasant misery, he who shared his
life and his lands with others? When I returned to the hills after months
of absence I ran up the path to meet him. He was working the land with
the others, a land he shared with those who had none. Although he never
heard and, consequently, never used the word, he behaved like a socialist.

When people were brought to him in his role of justice
of the peace, "sometimes bearing the marks of blows," and accused of stealing
a potato or a banana, Aristide's grandfather would release them the same
evening. "They took the potato because they were hungry," he would say,
"they have a right to it." The old man, writes Aristide, knew "that the
real thieves were not the ones who were brought before him." Injustice
was inherent in Haiti's dramatically skewed social hierarchy, in which
a handful of rich families drew their wealth from the sufferings of 99
percent of the people. In such a world, the law, however elegantly composed
in French, became just another instrument to perpetuate injustice.

According
to Aristide, his grandfather managed to straddle two worlds, holding a
place in the power structure of the countryside while at the same time
speaking out against it:

My grandfather did not know how to read or write,
but he expressed moral and transcendental values better than the greatest
books. His love for others shone in his eyes when he let fly at me, while
shaving himself in the morning: "You cannot count the hairs in my beard,
but you can count the people here who are suffering from injustice."

My grandfather raged against the abuses of the
most corrupt section chiefs…. He could play that role, since he was
so well known by the people, but he was disgusted at the thought of belonging
to a group, all too many of whom were characterized by rapacity and arbitrary
conduct.

It is not quite clear which "group" is meant here—chefs
de section? juges de paix? landholders?—but Aristide's grandfather
evidently had influence and power and yet managed to take advantage of
both to work against the system that had given them to him. This pattern
of delicate balancing his grandson would attempt to emulate in his dealings
with the Church.

In the countryside, as the young man returning from the
capital, he was, he admits, in "a privileged position." "I was often regarded
as the little prince returned from Portau-Prince…. I may perhaps
have appeared to them like a star fallen from the sky." During the summer,
the young boy and his sister helped the peasants compose letters, tried
to teach them to read and write. Early on, he says, he was "infected with
the priestly virus."

At five, he had begun school with the Salesian brothers,
and thereby entered the elite group—perhaps one Haitian child in
six—who have the means to attend classes regularly. Here the children,
speaking only Creole, were forbidden to use it, on pain of being beaten.
Henceforth, the tongue would be French: the language of Haiti's laws,
of its wealthy, the language of exclusion—the language of power,
or, as Aristide puts it, the instrument of "linguistic servitude." He
excelled in it nonetheless—language would be a special talent: he
eventually learned to speak eight—as he excelled in everything the
Salesians offered. He was "judged to be a brilliant scholar" and knew,
long before he graduated from primary school in 1966, that he would be
a priest.

4.

In Haiti, these were by far the blackest years. "Impossible
to darken that night," wrote Graham Greene, a visitor of the time. Aristide,
looking back, remarks that the "violence being done to the Haitian people
may have determined my priestly vocation," but there is little evidence
of it in his autobiography. He would have been four in 1957 when Dr. Franí§ois
Duvalier, a mumbling little country physician who wore thick spectacles,
and affected homburgs and dark formal suits, was elected president. The
parenthèse leading to the vote was violent and tumultuous—five
governments held power in nine months—and the presidential campaigns,
particularly Duvalier's, drew enormous crowds in the countryside, but
Aristide was likely too young to notice. "I began to detest the dictator
I did not know" at the age of nine or ten, he says—which is to say,
roughly at the climax of Duvalier's reign of terror, when the capital
was cloaked in nightly blackouts, when those foolish enough to venture
out often did not return, when random brutality (the murder of citizens
on the street, for example, in broad daylight, their bodies left as a
warning) served the dictator as a principle means of warding off challenges
to his power.

In the election—the first in Haiti in which all
adults were able to cast ballots—Duvalier had won roughly two votes
in three, and though pro-Duvalier officers had organized the balloting
and there was substantial fraud, contemporary accounts leave little doubt
of "Papa Doc's" popularity. Still, Duvalier had gained the presidency
with the help of the leaders of that "nonpolitical" army, bequeathed by
the Americans, who had quickly become, in Duvalier's words, "the arbiters
of national life," and, once arrived in the Palace, he faced a choice
that has haunted Haitian presidents: Would he serve as the creature of
the powerful—or fight to gain power on his own terms? He took the
latter course, and set out to achieve it the only way he could: by gaining
mastery over the officer corps.

This
he did by establishing a rival force, a militia of men and women who would
be absolutely ruthless, and loyal only to him. Duvalier drew the foot-soldiers
of his "National Security Volunteers," popularly known as the Tontons
Macoutes, largely from the brimming slums, from the great masses of idle
humanity blanketing the cities of a nation in which more than half the
people are unemployed—illiterate, abysmally poor people whose services
could be bought for a few dollars or a bit of food. A "true lumpen proletariat"—in
the words of Leslie Manigat, a political science professor who served
as Haiti's president for four months in 1988—they are "pawns, susceptible
of manipulation in electoral periods and a source of shock troops for
mob violence in moments of crisis and unrest."

Duvalier took these pawns and raised them up, clothed
them in the blue denim and red scarves of the Cacos—the peasant irregulars
who, by battling the American occupiers early in the century, had become
symbols of Haitian nationalism—and personally presented them with
the guns that he encouraged them to use. No one knew how many there were—ten
thousand or ten times that—but they quickly became the shock troops
of Duvalier's "revolution," serving not only as violent retainers but
as, in effect, a quasi-political party, the first mass political party
Haiti had ever known. The little doctor fashioned his Macoutes into a
fearsome weapon, used them to murder those officers whom he could not
bribe or outflank, to torture those businessmen he could not win over,
to kill or exile any Haitian who had managed to attain any reputation
or position that seemed a threat to the reclusive and paranoid Duvalier.
All who possessed a shred of independent power, or had a prospect of accumulating
any, were ruthlessly exterminated. The lucky ones—hundreds of thousands
of Haitians—escaped into exile in Paris or Montreal or New York.

During
these years, as Aristide completed his primary education and made ready
to enter the seminary, Papa Doc was waging a virtual Kulturkampf
against the Catholic Church, an institution that remained largely white
and foreign-born and that had long been perceived as an extension of the
Haitian elite. Macoutes invaded churches, attacked priests as they said
mass, in some cases murdered them. Duvalier expelled bishops, menaced
the hierarchy; from Rome, the Church responded by excommunicating him.

Aristide, at the Salesian seminary in the north of the
country, did not experience any of this directly—politics "did not
penetrate the seminary," he says—but his career would be crucially
affected by the results. For Duvalier would eventually succeed in defeating
the Vatican, forcing it, in 1966, to offer Haiti a Concordat that, among
other things, granted the dictator the right to nominate a new, Haitian-born
hierarchy. Henceforth, the bishops, like so much else in Haiti, would
become Duvalier's creatures, and the dictator would ensure that his "Haitianized"
hierarchy would never again presume to challenge those who held political
power. This was the Church in which Jean-Bertrand Aristide studied and
learned and grew to manhood—and the Church that would become one
of his bitterest and his most enduring foes.

—October 7, 1993

This is the first part of a three-part article.

Notes

[1]
The writer is Beale Davis, then chargé d'affaires at the American
legation, and the quotations from his reporting are drawn from Robert
Debs Heinl, Jr., and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story
of the Haitian People, 1492"“1971 (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp.
400"“401.

[2]
See Howard W. French, "New Campaign of Terror in Haiti is Linked to Police
and Army," The New York Times, September 5, 1993, p. 5.

[11]
Readers of the English version will be perplexed to learn that in this
peasant village of "cultivated hills," there are "neither roads, nor water,
nor electricity, nor any kind of farming"—the translator's peculiar
rendering of "ni route, ni eau, ni électricité…ni agronome."

Unfortunately, this is typical of the translation, which ranges from
barely competent to, as here, quite incomprehensible. Embarrassing errors
are strewn on virtually every page: formation (education, training)
rendered as "formation," for example; or religieux (in this context,
monks and nuns) as "religious"; or, ludicrously, lanbi—the
Haitian conch shell, used as a trumpet to summon workers, or to call
for help—as "tom-tom." The lanbi, which slaves used to call
their brothers to rebel against the master, has long been a symbol of
Haitian nationalism, and it is particularly mortifying to have Father
Aristide identifying it as a "tom-tom" in his autobiography.